Brand budgets continue to move into gaming, and they are moving with intent. Advertisers have stopped treating gaming as an experimental line item and started treating it as a channel with the reach, attention, and measurement to sit alongside anything else in the media plan.
But brand teams do not buy a single moment. They buy a funnel. Awareness, consideration, action, and they want the parts working together. So when a studio's inventory only serves one part of that funnel, it is only ever open to one kind of buyer. The money is there. The access is not.
That matters more than it used to. Monetization has moved decisively into bidding-first environments, where volume alone does not win an auction. Diversified demand does. And the fastest route to diversified demand is not adding more ads. It is making the ads you already run sellable to more of the market.
Two taps, one ad load
This is the part that gets missed. Non-clickable in-game formats largely attract brand and awareness budgets. Clickable formats attract performance and UA budgets. Run both, and the same placement becomes available to two entirely separate pools of ad budget.
The player's experience of the game does not change. The ad load does not go up. What changes is who is allowed to bid.
Across Anzu's platform, that shift shows up consistently in the data: studios running both formats together see fill rate gains of up to 51%, while clickable in-game formats alone command eCPMs 119% higher than non-clickable inventory. That is not a marginal gain. It is two separate markets opening up on the same ad load.
The objection, and why it is a fair one
Every developer we speak to has some version of the same instinct: more ads mean worse retention, and clicks mean a worse game. That belief was earned honestly. Players have spent years being funnelled through formats engineered to catch a stray thumb, and studios have watched the fallout in their own numbers.
But the problem was never the click. It was the click with nothing behind it.
An accidental click is bad for the player and, less obviously, bad for the developer's revenue. It inflates click-through rates artificially. It produces an immediate bounce. A misclick doesn’t just irritate a player, it quietly devalues the inventory it came from.
Intent, in other words, is not a courtesy. It is a commercial mechanism. Clean, deliberate interactions earn higher bids because they lead somewhere. That is why our clickable units use high-intent interaction models. As our In-Game Lead Designer Ulaş Mert Erkan put it recently, “the goal is to design placements that invite interaction without forcing it".
What happened when a studio actually did it
A prominent mobile game developer and publisher APPS enabled clickable in-game formats in their hit title Fashion Battle at the end of July 2025. Everything else stayed as it was. No new placements, no heavier ad load, no rebuilt stack.
Comparing the four months before against the eleven months since:
eCPM rose 47%
ARPDAU rose 50%
On iOS, eCPM more than doubled, up 123.5%, with ARPDAU up 108.4%
Total traffic to the game moved around considerably across that period, and January brought the seasonal dip that January always brings. Gross revenue followed those swings. Revenue per impression and per player did not. They went up and stayed up.
The pattern held when APPS did it again. In one of their other mobile games, Drill & Collect, average daily revenue rose 62%, eCPM rose 38%, and ARPDAU rose 49% after clicks were introduced, with iOS revenue more than doubling. Both platforms moved in the same direction in both titles. iOS simply moved harder.
And here is the proof point that does not live in a spreadsheet: APPS has kept clickable in-game formats running for eleven months, and then shipped them into a second game.
"We've been working with Anzu across our mobile portfolio for years, and they've consistently found new ways to add more value. Their clickable in-game formats are the latest example — more revenue, without compromising the player experience," — Orhun Mert Simsek, CMO, APPS
How can you test this in your own game?
Run clickable and non-clickable together. They are not competing formats. They are competing budgets.
Measure incremental uplift. Total revenue moves for a hundred reasons. Uplift tells you what the change actually did.
Read eCPM and fill rate. A rising eCPM on falling fill is not a win.
Judge everything on ARPU, retention and LTV. Format-level eCPM in isolation is how studios end up optimising themselves into a worse game.
If you are weighing up how to expand your monetization, get in touch with us. We are happy to walk you through how other studios are approaching it.